Tag: comedy

Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens (1979)

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Welcome to the grand conclusion of Russ Meyer Month II here at B-Movie Enema!

We finish with Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens. This 1979 sexploitation satire not only brings our journey through another month of Russ Meyer movies to an end, but it, more or less, also signals the end of Meyer’s career itself. This is the final non-documentary film the King of Sexploitation Films ever made. He would end up doing some additional tongue-in-cheek documentaries like Mondo Topless, Too, Melissa Mounds, and Pandora Peaks but he never did do another narrative film after this movie’s release.

The reason for that is rather simple. While Meyer’s films were still popular, and he was a likable figure in the realm of softcore films, the hardcore porn industry became, for a lack of a better term, mainstream by the 70s with hits like Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, and Debbi Does Dallas becoming as close to household titles as porn films could get. Meyer did still mostly retire from film a very wealthy fella. He personally oversaw the management and licensing of his own library of films. It’s likely why so many of his movies do not still have HD restorations or Blu-Ray releases. The exact state of the rights to his movies isn’t clearly defined from what I could find after a cursory search. If you go to the right places and the right conventions, you can usually score a 22-film box set for not too expensive at all, but the films’ looks and transfers are not consistent. It’s why some of the pics I used during the course of this month have been a bit rough.

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Common Law Cabin (1967)

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As we pass out of the dog days of summer, and transition into the colorful days of autumn, I think it’s time we checked in with an old friend – Russ Meyer! We begin with this week’s new B-Movie Enema review with 1967’s Common Law Cabin.

I might as well go ahead and call this month Russ Meyer Month II. I’ve visited the works of the great Mr. Meyer in two different ways. First, if you go back to May 2020, COVID was raging like a bad case of hemorrhoids and the first Russ Meyer Month was rocking and rolling with some of the nudie film master’s most recognizable films. The second time I came to something Russ Meyer, it was to warm things up last December with the pretty great (and fairly sexy) Supervixens. It was very clearly time to return.

This month, I’ve got five more classics to discuss. I very specifically chose four films for their titles. The fifth, well, it’s another time Meyer worked with my all-time favorite critic, Roger Ebert. This first movie is, on the surface, maybe, the oddest of this month’s collection.

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Flesh Gordon (1974)

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Some weeks ago, I took a look at the 1972 cult, adult, animated classic Fritz the Cat. In that review, I talked about that movie having a reputation that precedes itself. Just the title almost gives it a mythical aura. I mentioned a couple other movies in that review, and one of those is the topic of this week’s B-Movie Enema review – Flesh Gordon.

Obviously, 1974’s Flesh Gordon is a sex parody of the classic Flash Gordon serials of the early days of swashbuckling matinees. So I guess we should start with the subgenre itself. The sex comedy actually goes waaaaay back to ancient Greek theatre. Basically, it’s farcical sex. This carried into the Roman times which actually then became the major influence of what we know as situational comedies, better referred to as the sitcom.

In the mid to late 17th century, of all peoples, the English brought the sex comedy back into popularity. However, the origins, and the eventual influence, of Flesh Gordon can go to a period of the 50s and earlier 60s when Hollywood would have these cheeky romantic comedies that were charged with a bit of sex appeal. This was directly influenced by the early sexual revolution of Playboy magazine being introduced and sexologist Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University studying the sex lives of women. This would eventually bring us to the late 60s and early 70s when Hollywood itself would shift to a new style and way of business and indie filmmakers looking for a start would make a whole bunch of scandalous comedies that could play with the new lifestyles that grew out of the late 60s as well as nudity and much more open discussion of sex lives.

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Deathstalker II (1987)

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Welcome to the final B-Movie Enema article for June!

So we spent a lot of time this month catching up with sequels to movies I’ve covered before. We started June with introducing ourselves to a series I’ve wanted to dive into for a while – Deathstalker. In the interest of keeping up with the whole point of this month, we’re going to round things out with Deathstalker II. If you think this is going to just be more of the same from the first film, well, you’ll be surprised to hear it isn’t. This is actually more of a comedy.

There could be multiple reasons why this sequel, that came four years after the original that was a success, decided to go this route. First of all, this was the final sword and sorcery film made in the Roger Corman-Argentinian deal. (To find out more about that, hit that link the paragraph above to read the review of that first film.) Honestly, the window had closed on these types of fantasy films by 1987. So why not try doing something a little different? Maybe wink and nod at the audience that these movies are kind of silly. Bringing Jim Wynorski in as director of this sequel certainly changes the mood. Wynorski’s pretty good at infusing a little bit of cheeky self-deprecation into his films. But then also the film was fairly low budget.

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Vice Academy Part 3 (1991)

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Welcome back to yet another B-Movie Enema and yet another entry in the Vice Academy saga!

When Vinegar Syndrome released a box set of Vice Academy movies, they only released the first half. I think we all assumed there would be a second volume with the fourth, fifth, and sixth entries but we’ve not heard anything yet as of this article’s creation. The good news, though, is that the entire series is on Tubi so… I guess all we’re waiting on is for Vinegar Syndrome to get their shit together to clean them up nicer than shit? I dunno.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago as I was setting up Vice Academy Part 2, writer, director, and producer Rick Sloane, for the most part, is really best known for these movies and his two Hobgoblins movies. That said, I think it might be accurate to say he was a student of B-movies as a kid. He seemed to really be into the Roger Corman type stuff as he became deeply inspired by Hollywood Boulevard, a movie produced by Corman, directed by Joe Dante, and featured right here on this blog! But because he was so inspired by that, when he started working on his very first feature, Blood Theater, he was able to convince Hollywood Boulevard star (and Corman alum) Mary Woronov to headline that first movie. He did this at the age of 21.

In a lot of ways, I really do have a great deal of, for a lack of a better word, sympathy for Sloane. His movies have been bashed throughout his career. However, I do wonder if that even bothers him. You see, the guy clearly loves his B-movies. He may be closer to a Jim Wynorski type where he likes to interject sex and comedy into his movies. These aren’t the type of movies that will go over well with critics, but these Vice Academy movies WILL go over well on USA Up All Night where they became hits in the 90s thanks to Rhonda Shear bringing a lot of teenage fellas to the TV on Friday and Saturday nights before they had cars.

But enough of that… Let’s get into Vice Academy Part 3 where our lovely cops to stop and frisk some female inmates on the run!

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Vice Academy Part 2 (1990)

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Welcome to B-Movie Enema, my dear Enemaniacs! This week, we’re going to get back to a series I started back in summer of 2020 when I looked at the first of SIX Vice Academy movies. We had some fun times with the lovely ladies of the academy as they certainly put the bust in busting bad guys. Considering it’s been almost three years since doing that movie, and this month is all about catching up with some old friends in sequels to movies I’ve covered before, it was high time I go back to the Rick Sloane series. So, here we are with Vice Academy Part 2 released the very next year after the first movie’s release.

I know I talked a little bit about Rick Sloane in the first Vice Academy movie, but I kind of want to swing back around to him for this second movie. There really are only three things Sloane has done stuff with in his life. Of course, maybe his longest running gig was cranking out these six Vice Academy flicks. His next most recognizable thing were two Hobgoblins movies. I talked last time about how that was mercilessly riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000 in one of my all time favorite episodes of that series. Since then, alumni of MST3K riffed it again at a life Rifftrax event that was also pretty great.

Interestingly, while Sloane did make other movies here or there, he has a major passion for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He grew up during the explosion of that film becoming the all time kin… er, queen(?) of cult flicks. When he was still fairly young, he worked with 20th Century Fox to help promote The Rocky Horror Picture Show while also producing some silly grindhouse-style shorts cut like trailers. He showed those during a Rocky Horror convention in Southern California. That also coincided with the promotional push for the sequel, Shock Treatment.

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Fritz the Cat (1972)

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Oh man… This one is long overdue.

Welcome to this week’s new B-Movie Enema review. If you’re roughly my age (46) and frequented cable TV and video stores in the 80s and 90s, there were a few titles that almost seemed mythical in their reputation. These are your Faces of Death movies or Heavy Metal or Flesh Gordon or Wizards or maybe even something like a movie that had a tad more mainstream acceptance like Watership Down. These were movies that were full of wonder in the fact that they were either seemingly explicitly adult or were gory or, as is the case with Wizards, Heavy Metal, and Watership Down, were animated movies that were either not for kids or featured some pretty extreme stuff that would scar kids.

Then, there was Fritz the Cat.

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Girly (a.k.a Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly, 1970)

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Welcome back to B-Movie Enema, my lovelies!

This week, we have a film from British cinematographer and director Freddie Francis – Girly. Now, this one was more commonly known as Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly in the United Kingdom. We’ll come back around to the utterly bizarre plot of Girly in a bit. First, we should talk about Freddie Francis.

Francis is best known for his work with Hammer Film Productions on films like The Evil of Frankenstein and Dracula Has Risen from the Grave and from Hammer rival Amicus Productions on The Deadly Bees and Tales from the Crypt. But, in truth, Francis was a very keen cinematographer. He twice won Oscars for 1960’s Sons and Lovers and 1989’s Glory. Beyond those films, he has a ton of other significant films he shot like 1980’s The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch, Karel Reisz’s 1981 film The French Lieutenant’s Woman starring Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, and Martin Scorsese’s creepy as hell 1991 remake Cape Fear.

He also shot Lynch’s 1984 version of Dune, so… you know… they can’t all be winners.

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